Most House Salads Are Terrible. Make Yours Shockingly Superb.

There is no salad on the menu at Lucali, Mark Iacono’s candlelit restaurant in Brooklyn, only pizza and calzones. But sometimes, and only if he thought to make it in the afternoon, he serves one anyway, a salad he says is meant to recall the end of Sunday dinners with his extended family, when it was just him and his grandmother left at the table. It’s a salad he would eat on the same plate he used for the spaghetti, the meatballs, the ziti — whatever she cooked, something meaty and red. The tomatoes are salty and soft, but the lettuce is still crisp, and there are black olives and a little red onion and maybe some soft leaves of celery. And when it’s all gone, he can run sesame bread through the pink-red dressing pooled at the bottom of the plate, and it’s perfect, the best thing to eat.

Pizza restaurants often serve salads like these, though they rarely rise to such heights. House salads, they’re generally called — all pale iceberg and wan tomatoes, canned olives, chunks of onion, everything awash in a watery vinaigrette. You see a pile of that next to a steaming pizza, a sad, eat-your-vegetables side dish against all the cheese and pepperoni, and you know it’s just something to pick at and eventually wave away. So it can be disconcerting, at first, to eat a version that is actually luscious, to experience how supermarket ingredients can be transformed through technique and chemistry into something delicious and rare. I ate that very salad at Lucali, dumbfounded and chuckling. I wanted to eat it all the time.

A few days later, on a blustery afternoon a few hours before people started lining up outside to wait for a table, I descended into the restaurant’s tiny basement prep kitchen to watch Iacono assemble it, this seemingly simple dish that is so often terrible, that he makes so well. There was not much down there, not even a stove, just an induction burner Iacono uses to make sauce and fry meatballs, and a big industrial floor mixer for his dough. A tankard of Filippo Berio olive oil, pale and sunny, sat on a shelf, near a bottle of Progresso red-wine vinegar. His spice rack was spare: coarsely ground black pepper, salt, red-pepper flakes and the fragrant mixture known as lemon-and-pepper seasoning. “For what I cook, you just need what’s in, like, your grandmother’s house,” Iacono said. “Sometimes I have oregano. That’s it.”

Iacono cut tomatoes while he spoke, the kind you get at the market that aren’t as big as baseballs. He put the wedges into a bowl and salted them heavily. “They can take a lot of salt,” he said. He added slices of red onion, slices of celery, a healthy pour of the olive oil and a slightly smaller one of the red-wine vinegar. “You kind of want it to make you cough,” he said. A shake of black pepper followed, and one of the lemon pepper. He opened a can of black olives, pitted, slate black. “People are offended by these,” he said. “But the culinary stuff, the oil-cured fancy olives, they overpower.” He pinched each olive slightly before adding it to the bowl. “So they don’t roll around on the plate,” he said. Iacono mixed the salad gently, with a spoon. “You let it sit in the fridge for a while, let the tomatoes really bleed out,” he said, “and that is a good salad right there.”

This was the secret: time. “That salad you eat at home, maybe it’s been sitting around for a while,” Iacono said. “The dressing’s really gotten into the tomatoes, melted them down.” And indeed, an hour’s rest in the seasoning transformed the tomatoes amazingly, amplifying their flavor and deepening their acidity, allowing all the ingredients to meld into soft salty juiciness that tasted of a heat wave in September, even on a chill winter’s eve. But Iacono takes another step, and it’s an important one: salad as construction rather than mélange. He layers the softened tomatoes over and under crisp, cold hearts of torn iceberg lettuce before dressing the finished salad with a final spray of vinaigrette. “Don’t ever, ever toss it,” he said. “You want the lettuce crisp.”

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CreditGentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.

At Lucali, Iacono plops a meatball on top of the salad, a homage to those kitchen dinners with his grandmother. But the salad goes as well alongside a pizza or under a sausage simmered in sauce, with stuffed shells, lasagna, on top of the leavings from a serving of Sunday ragu, a delicious taste of the cuisine that developed in America when Italians came to its shores.

But don’t call it Italian-American food. Iacono’s eyes flash at the term. “There’s no such thing as Italian-American cooking anymore,” he said. “There are no Italian-Americans anymore. There are Americans whose families came here from Italy. And this is how we cook. You’re not going to find it over there.” Iacono visited Italy for the first time only last year. He didn’t recognize the food. “The pizza there, it’s like half burned, half raw,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t even know if it’s pizza.”